


Calle Does Dessert

by Routcliffe



Series: Mulige Verdener [5]
Category: Ylvis
Genre: 4 Stjerners Middag, Gen, drunk cooking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 01:26:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13493916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Routcliffe/pseuds/Routcliffe
Summary: Believe it or not, Rein Alexander was not his first choice.





	Calle Does Dessert

In retrospect, the logic had been flawed from the start, Calle thought glumly as he surveyed the charred wreckage of his third attempt. 

He had volunteered to do the dessert on his own for three reasons. The first was that he had enough sense not to go near the main meal. He would be a helping hand for the boys, who actually could cook. That part he still stood by. The second was that baking had very precise recipes, and Vegard had told him again and again that if you followed the recipe, everything would be fine, and, well, he’d seen how that had turned out. Finally, he had reasoned, if he was a terrible cook sober, he might be a better cook drunk, and this, _this_ was where everything had gone wrong. 

He _wanted_ to be a good cook. He believed in principle that everyone should share equally in managing of a household, and besides, it was an impressive skill. Certainly getting drunk first worked for some things, but typically only the things that people were bad at because of their inhibitions. Calle’s problem was not that he was an inhibited cook, but that he was an inattentive one. He had no patience for standing over a pan. He had stuff to do. So he’d go over and do something else while he waited, and then by the time he got back to it everything was ruined.

He’d tried to mitigate this tendency by cooking everything at the highest possible temperature, so he could spend as little time as possible minding it. It didn’t help. It might even have made things worse.

Vegard professed an inability to understand. It was just a matter of following what the recipe said. Once you'd gotten it right a couple of times you could start to experiment, but if it said medium heat or stir constantly it probably had good reasons for saying so. 

Bård, a little more sympathetic, suggested that he might try setting timers for things, to remind him to check on them. It had made so much sense, and seemed so promising, that Calle had decided to impress Kaja, and gone off and bought an expensive roast. The timer went off, and he went in and checked with the thermometer, and it wasn’t quite done yet. Close, but not quite. So he set the timer for another five minutes, and when it went off, noted that it was time to go in and check the meat. He had remembered it again half an hour later, when he got up to go to the bathroom, by which point the roast was building material. Kaja had still been very kind about it.

“You need one that starts going off and won’t stop until you turn it off,” Vegard said, when he’d heard what happened. So Calle had tried that instead, with a curry that he had been directed to let simmer for half an hour. 

Calle had shown up the next day still faintly redolent of smoke and curry. Bård grinned at him. “Lose track again, Larsen?”

“It’s not enough to turn off the alarm,” Calle reported wearily. “You have to turn off the stove, too. Or else the smoke detector goes, and shutting that one off is much harder.”

Nevertheless, their attitude had stung him a little today. “You can just get a melon when we go shopping,” Bård said, clapping Calle hard on the shoulder with an exuberance born of excitement and akevitt. “You don’t need to cook anything.” 

That was exactly what Calle had been going to do, but they’d all been drinking since he’d gotten there at ten, and the lack of faith in him raised his hackles a little. “You don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll give you a dessert you’ll never forget.”

He went on his phone and found the perfect recipe: a chocolate layer cake, not too difficult, but well reviewed. Not saying a word to anyone as they went about tech things and booze things and making an inventory of the kitchen equipment and putting together a shopping list, he preheated the oven. While the boys chopped onions, he stole into the dining room with his arms full of ingredients, and put them all together. Butter, sugar, and eggs in one bowl; cocoa, water, and vanilla in another; flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a third. 

The numbers were odd and hard to manage, but he followed the recipe as exactly as he could, mixing each stage thoroughly in its own bowl. Then he was supposed to add the dry ingredients to the butter and eggs and sugar alternately with the cocoa mixture, and did he really have the patience? He reminded himself that he was following this recipe exactly, that if he followed the recipe exactly no harm could come to him. He tipped the dry ingredients in. A little sprinkle of flour trickled out of the bowl. He gave it a little tap, and half the bowl’s contents _flump_ ed into the butter. 

He mixed it in, but at that point, there was no point in being finicky about it, was there? He poured all of the cocoa mixture in, stirred, pour the rest of the flour in, and stirred some more. 

“Bård?” he called into the kitchen, eyeing the recipe, “do we have layer pans?”

“No,” Bård called back. “You never said you’d need layer pans.”

“Are you making a cake?” Vegard asked incredulously, poking his head in the door. It threw him off balance, and he had to prop himself up against the wall. 

“None of your business,” Calle slurred.

Vegard took a few uneven steps into the dining room. He was less accustomed to drinking, and not as good at it. “Because if you were making a cake, hypo…hype…hypothetically speaking, if you didn’t have layer pans, you could use one pan and cut it into layers afterward.”

“If I were making a cake,” Calle said, enunciating very carefully, “hy-po-thet-ic-al-ly speaking, I might thank you for your learned counsel.”

“Were you to thank me for your learned, I mean my learned, I mean…” Vegard stopped in the doorway, eyes merry, face flushed and a little swollen with drink. He seemed to be trying to figure out which pronouns went where by counting on his fingers. “I mean…” He doubled over, letting loose a string of high thin giggles and the occasional guffaw, and reeled back into the other room. “Learned counsel,” he gasped, barely comprehensible.

Calle had to step over him to get a square pan from the kitchen. He upended the batter into it. He remembered afterward that it ought to have been greased, so he poured it all back in the bowl, took a handful of the remaining butter, and smeared it all over the pan, creating a buttery, battery slurry. It would have to do. His hands were buttery now, and he nearly dropped the pan twice as he went for the oven. 

Thirty minutes for layers. And layers was what he wanted. He set the timer. “Don’t let me forget this,” he told Bård, who was measuring out flour into a measuring cup by the teaspoonful, propping his head up on one elbow. Calle turned around to the camera crew, who were sober. “Don’t let me forget this.”

The timer went off after thirty minutes. Calle heard it, but he was trying to get the batter off the dining room table. And the backs of the chairs. And the doorknobs.

“Calle, your timer is going off,” Bård said. 

“Right, right,” Calle muttered, trying to sling the batter-covered cloth over one shoulder and missing. He heard it land with a splat, made a mental note to come back to it, and forgot about it immediately thereafter. Five days later, the owners of the house would follow an unusually earthy smell to the potted plant in the corner.

The top of the cake was puffed up, and it still looked nice and moist, which was good. Calle took it out of the oven and set it on the counter. The top wobbled slightly.

"Right," he said, pleased with himself. 

He was supposed to let it cool for ten minutes before taking it out of the pan. He set an alarm for ten minutes, and went back to clean up batter.

When he got back to the cake, Bård was in front of it, his chin propped up in both hands now as he peered owlishly at the pan. There was a huge dip in the middle of the cake. “What did you do?” Calle demanded, incredulous.

“Just watching,” Bård said dreamily. He stood up and turned around, and nearly went over. “It happens sometimes. It dips. It’s okay. ‘Specially if you’re cutting it up later.” 

Calle got a spatula and gently, ever so gently, eased the cake out of the pan. Perfect. _Perfect._ Maybe there was something to this following the recipe business.

"Nice job, Larsen!" Bård stepped closer to look, but he tripped, bounced off the counter, and managed to keep his feet by doing a full pirouette. He beamed. “I feel like going to the store now.”

***

It took them an hour and a half. It shouldn’t have, but between the camera crew and the chestnut mixup and juggling in the aisles and Calle getting in trouble for nicking that dry-cured ham, they were there for longer than he’d planned. He’d managed to get half a kilogram of dark chocolate for the icing. After some thought, he made it a full kilogram.

The cake was completely cool when they got back. It was still sunken in the middle, but maybe if he put that part on the bottom, no one would notice.

Now, the layers. He held the knife as steady as possible, and sliced sideways. And let out a strangled cry as slowly, ever so slowly, batter welled up in the cut he’d made and gushed out the side. 

Bård, clumsily measuring spices for the rub, turned around. "You okay?" He saw the cake, and his eyes lit up and his hand went to his mouth and his shoulders started to shake. 

These things really needed you to add the ingredients alternately.

Clearly cake was too complicated. Calle took out his phone, swore, gently cleaned the batter off the screen, and looked up something different. Something that would be easy, but still impressive. Something that used chocolate. Chocolate mousse looked like just the thing. 

So, that would take three eggs, and they had a dozen and a half. And heavy cream. Would he have to go to the store again? After what had happened with the ham, he wasn't certain that they would let him in. He found a litre of cream in the fridge. "Can I take some of this?" he asked.

Bård had moved on to grating potatoes. "Fancy," he said approvingly, and then yelped and started swearing. "None of them is vegetarian, are they?" he said, his voice suddenly plaintive, as Calle passed him a paper towel for his bleeding knuckles. 

"If you're serving them reindeer steaks, I don't think you have to worry," Calle soothed. 

"Good, because the soup isn't vegetarian anymore."

"I think that's beautiful," said Magnus the intern, pushing forward with the first aid kit. They'd gotten him this year, fresh from the Lambertseterrevy. He was a great monolith of a man, and that could have been very imposing, but Magnus looked like someone had cross-bred a koala with a golden retriever and magicked the whole thing human. He was friendly, eager to please, a bit slow in the mornings, and funny as hell. He scrubbed his hands with an alcohol wipe, and then used another to disinfect Bård's knuckles. "Every dish you make is supposed to have a little bit of yourself in it, isn't it?"

"Eat me," said Bård, perfectly deadpan, and then spoiled it by cracking up. 

Satisfied that Bård was being seen to, Calle gathered up the things he'd need: cream, eggs, more chocolate, butter, and sugar. The recipe called for coffee, too, to be melted with the chocolate, and he used the Keurig in the corner to make two espressos before remembering that the brothers hated coffee. He drank the espressos and measured sixty millilitres of Scotch whiskey instead. Scotch and chocolate went together, didn't they?

Now. He scrolled down on his phoned, frowning. Melt the chocolate with the coffee--Scotch--over a double boiler. He had no idea what a double boiler was, so he got a small pot, and turned the stove on low. That could sit for a little while. 

Whip the cream, now. He had to shift Vegard a little to get at the mixer. The eldest Ylvisåker was squinting at his own recipe. "I can't remember if I added the broth already. Did you see me add the broth?" He sloshed the contents of the pot. "I can't tell if this is too much liquid."

"Maybe a little less tequila," Call suggested.

"Right," Vegard said. Then he frowned. "Hey!"

Calle whipped the cream first, and put it aside in its own bowl. By this time, the Scotch and the chocolate were boiling. They didn't smell that great. Calle tried to stir the mixture around, but it was very clumpy. 

"Scorched," Vegard said over his shoulder in a self-satisfied puff of fumes, as he put the pot for his sauce on the stove. "You melt chocolate over water."

"Ah," Calle said. Yeah, well. The mousse was just going to have to be crunchy. 

“What are you doing, anyway?”

"It's a surprise," Calle said. 

He cracked three egg whites into the bowl he'd just whipped the cream in. It was all going to the same place, wasn't it? Got a bit of yolk, too, but he scooped out nearly all of it, and started the beaters. 

Most of the yolks got stirred into the lumpy chocolate and Scotch, where they became their own tiny golden chunks. 

The whites were taking longer than he expected. He set the timer for five minutes, and started helping Vegard at the stove. 

The timer went off as he was prodding the flaming pan with a broom. Fortunately, the contents were unharmed; Calle had slopped some down the side when he’d been drinking out of it and the burner had caught it alight. The fire died down when it was away from the heat. 

He checked the egg whites. They hadn’t whipped up yet. Maybe if he added the sugar… A little at a time, it said, so he did it a few grains at a time. He waited and waited, looking for even the smallest change.

He felt a chin on his shoulder. Vegard’s voice said in his ear, “Are you trying to make meringue?”

Calle glanced around to make sure Bård wasn’t going to overhear. “Mousse,” he confessed.

“Oh,” Vegard said. “It’s not going to work. You got yolk in it.” He dipped a finger into the bowl. “And the bowl is oily. They’re not going whip up.”

Calle sighed and turned the mixer off. He sagged into a chair that wasn’t there, and wound up in a heap on the floor. Vegard slithered down next to him, and passed him a bottle of tequila. After looking it over, Calle took a swig.

“We didn’t expect you to do anything fancy,” Vegard said comfortingly. “We know you can’t cook.”

“Vegard,” Calle said, “Vegard?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing you are saying helps even a little bit.”

“Oh,” Vegard said, brow furrowing. He seemed to think it over. “What _would_ help?”

Calle reached for the tequila again. “Pass that over.”

***

When he opened his eyes, he saw that the hands on the clock had moved. Vegard had pulled a chair in front of the stove and sat with his chin resting on his arms, watching a pot bubble with bleary fascination.

“Calle?” a voice said. 

Calle looked up, way up, and saw Magnus the intern. He tottered to his feet. “What’s up?”

“I know you’re not having a lot of luck with the dessert, and I just thought... well...” He handed Calle a slip of paper. “My mother makes these. They’re very good. And I know you have chocolate.”

Calle peered at the recipe. “I don’t have dried cherries.”

Magnus handed him a bag of dried cherries. “I thought... when I saw your cake fall, I just thought, just in case...”

“Thank you,” Calle said, and now, god, he was getting misty. “That’s so kind. You’re a prince among men, Magnus Devold. I hope wonderful things happen to you. I hope you get famous. I hope you get your own show. Many shows.”

Magnus nodded and turned away in a hurry, probably to save Calle the embarrassment of tearing up in front of him. 

Magnus’ handwritten directions looked complicated, but once he got into it, it wasn’t so bad. After waiting for Vegard to finish with the sauce and totter away, Calle melted more of the chocolate he’d bought, this time looking up “double boiler” and melting it over water. He creamed the butter, the sugar, the brown sugar, the eggs, and the vanilla. He was beginning to see a pattern to these things. Then--in accordance with the pattern--he whisked together the dry ingredients, and added them in gradually. Fold in chopped chocolate and cherries, and... voilà! These looked good. He had a good feeling about them. He dropped everything by fistfuls onto two parchment-lined trays, and slid them into the oven. This was going to work. 

Vegard staggered back over, his feet bare, his shirt untucked, and propped himself up on the stove. “What’s this melted chocolate for?” he asked.

Calle roared a couple of things that were technically not anatomically advisable with melted chocolate, pulled the cookies out of the oven, scraped them back into the bowl, and folded in the chocolate. He should have added it after the eggs. He wondered if he’d ruined everything; he hoped not. He got two pieces of fresh parchment and put the cookies out again. 

He waited ten minutes. Planted himself in front of the oven door and waited, with a whirlwind of cooking going on around him. When the timer went off, he dutifully switched the trays around on the racks.

The cookies already looked and smelled delicious. They were going to work this time. He was sure of it. 

“Carl Frederik, can you help me set the table?” Bård asked.

“Sure,” he said, washing his hands, “but when that timer goes, I’ve got to go too.”

“Understood,” Bård said. “Whatever you’ve got in there, it smells great.”

The smell filled the house. It started to shade into something else a little more acrid. Calle recognized it.

He bounded into the kitchen, and opened the oven just as the smoke detector started to go off. His cookies... his beautiful chocolate cookies!

“I didn’t hear the timer,” he said numbly, amidst the din. He passed the sound guy a tea towel, and used the oven mitt to pull the smoking tray out of the oven. “I don’t understand. It didn’t make a sound.”

Vegard had come rushing in when the smoke detector went off. “You’ve still got two minutes,” he said. 

“I don’t understand,” Calle said again. 

Vegard’s jaw dropped. He looked horrified. 

“What?” Calle demanded. “ _What?_ ”

“I set, I set, I noticed the chocolate because I was setting the oven to do the potatoes,” Vegard said. He grabbed Calle’s forearm and hugged it, squeezing Calle’s hand. “It’s all my fault. I set it and I didn’t think.” He looked up with earnest and slightly bloodshot brown eyes. “Calle, I am so sorry.”

Calle used his free arm to give Vegard a quick tight hug. He was disappointed about the cookies, but he felt a mighty flood of relief that it hadn’t been _his_ fault this time. The cookies had probably been done when he’d rotated the racks, and maybe a more experienced person would have seen that, but it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t experienced, and there was no point speculating. “It’s okay,” he said, extricating his fist from Vegard’s grip. “Can you do something for me?”

Vegard bit his lip and nodded. With his eyes wide and dark and a little mazy, and a stray curl in his face, he looked about eight. Well, eight with stubble. 

“I just need you to tell Magnus what happened. And that I’m grateful for the recipe. I have to go to the store.”

“You shouldn’t walk,” Vegard said. “You’re too drunk to walk.”

“Are you going to drive me?”

“Okay, I can--” Vegard frowned and shook himself, and glared. “Wait. No. _No_.”

“I’ll take the tram,” Calle said. It couldn’t hurt him to get some of the alcohol out of his system. He was feeling a bit gross. “I could use some sobering up anyway.”

The fresh air helped a little. He sat down at the stop and waited. An hour and change until Dag and Marianne got there. He fell asleep with his cheek smeared against the Plexiglas of the shelter, and two trams went by while he slept.

He caught the third, and it spit him out in front of the grocery store they’d visited earlier. He stumbled in through the first set of automatic doors, and found himself unable to go further. Perhaps because a tall solid blonde woman had a hand on his chest. He arranged his face into its most charming expression. “Hello.”

She returned the smile, but she said, “Aren’t you the TV guy who tried to walk off with the ham earlier today?”

“I am,” said Calle, “and I really am very sorry, but I just have to get--”

“I can’t let you in,” said the employee. “First and foremost you’re barred for a week, and even if you weren’t, you’re far too drunk for us to serve you.”

“But I’m wearing shoes this time!”

“Still drunk, sir.”

“Please,” Calle said, sagging against the carts a little, giving her his best puppy dog eyes. “I need a melon. I have to make dessert for my friends.” 

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. 

“Pudding cups then?” Calle said plaintively. 

She looked exasperated. “Wanting to get pudding cups instead of a melon does not make you any less drunk!”

“Nugatti, then. We can have it on celery. Wait, no, they hate celery. Something about the bitterness. I’ll give you five hundred kroner for a jar of Nugatti.”

The employee looked disgusted. “Good night, sir,” she said. She spun him around by the shoulders and pointed him outside. He knew better than to turn back.

Well, he thought as he walked back to the tram stop, that was that. He supposed he could spread raw cake batter on the burnt cookies. Maybe frost them with some stubbornly liquid egg whites? It would be funny, and it would certainly be unforgettable. It also stood an above-average chance of giving everyone salmonella. Well, if they were going to feel terrible tomorrow _anyway_... Probably the alcohol in their stomachs would kill anything anyway. Or he could soak it in more alcohol and set it on fire! Genius!

All right, that was the plan, then. 

He got to the stop, and saw that he had just missed a tram. He pulled out his phone, and searched “How to set things on fire.” The results were not helpful; they just made him feel vaguely guilty. Maybe he should see if that dessert place he and Kaja loved so much delivered. He started to thumb through his contact list. It would be cheating, and unless they had something really unique it would be falling through on his promise to the brothers, but...

But nothing. He was partway through the A’s, and Rein Alexander’s name hovered in front of him. A slow, sloppy smile spread over Calle’s face. He had an idea, and they would certainly not forget it. He hit “call.” 

“Hello? Rein, it’s Calle Hellevang-Larsen. What are you doing tonight? Ah! Well, I know it’s short notice, but how’d you like to make ten thousand kroner?”

***

The next day, the office was abuzz.

“What the hell is that?” demanded Calle, leaning heavily against the doorframe of Bård’s office.

“The lights,” Vegard said without taking his forehead off the desk, his voice muffled by his sleeve. 

Bård raised a hand in a sort of vague fluttery gesture. “They’re going to fix it this afternoon. Of all the days for this to happen…”

“Make more sense to do yesterday on a Friday,” Vegard mumbled, “but Dag has gigs, ‘member?”

“We’ll know for next time,” Calle said, and watched Bård’s middle finger spring to attention.

“I am never, ever, ever, ever, _ever_ doing that again,” Bård groaned.

“How did the footage turn out?” Calle asked. 

Still not lifting his head, Vegard pressed a button on a remote control. Calle watched Bård throw up in the sink, and turned away, grimacing.

“There’s fifteen minutes of you sleeping in the corner,” Vegard said. 

Bård took the remote from Vegard, and skipped around a bit. He fast-forwarded to all of them piled onto the couch, bleary-eyed and leaning all over the place. Vegard was passed out on the arm of the couch, with a vein standing out in his forehead. Rein Alexander’s voice floated over everything, turning the scene melancholy.

There was admiration in Bård’s voice as he said, “Larsen, what the hell were you thinking?” 

“I said it would be a dessert you’d never forget,” Calle said. “I didn’t say anything about taste.”

Vegard turned his head so that half a well-shielded eye and the corner of a smile were visible. “On that metric, it was still a failure, because I don’t remember any of this.” He appeared to think it over. “Less of a failure than your actual cooking, though.”

Calle bared his teeth at them both. “Thanks.”

**Author's Note:**

> Work and life are kicking my butt this week, but I finally finished the first draft of the next long thing, so I have posted this little bit of nonsense in celebration.


End file.
